Arts & Culture | Film

For the second time this year, a musical takes as its inspiration the biblical “Song of Songs.” “Shulamit,” a Hebrew-language drama (with English supertitles), is the brainchild of Dina Pruzhansky. (It follows Andrew Beall and Neil Van Leeuwen’s “Song of Solomon” this summer.) Pruzhansky is a COJECO BluePrint Fellow (the program facilitates projects from young Jewish adults of Russian origin). Radio broadcaster Robert Sherman hosts the opening night event.

A veteran film editor and director-producer of several documentaries, all of which center on the African-American experience, Adam Zucker won a travel grant to Poland in 2008. He had not been there before, and had only distant family ties to the country.

It is the evening of Aug. 24, 1944, and Allied troops are headed for Occupied Paris. The Wehrmacht, commanded by Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, are IS preparing to dynamite all the bridges in the city except the Pont Neuf, and all the landmarks. All that remains is for the order to be given.

Seventy years ago this week, four women prisoners took part in an act of heroic resistance at Auschwitz, for which they were later hanged. Ala Gertner, Roza Robota, Regina Szafirsztajn, and Estera Wajcblum, all Polish Jews, were instrumental in smuggling gunpowder from a munitions factory to leaders of the underground in Birkenau, the adjacent camp. Their co-conspirators managed to blow up a crematorium, damaging it beyond repair so it was never used again.

It would be hard to conceive of a more controversial figure in the Nazi inner circle than Albert Speer. One of Hitler’s closest confidantes, Speer was a master architect who had the ear of the failed-artist-turned-Führer. He was an integral part of the totality that was Nazi Germany, the chief creator of the Nazi public aesthetic, as well as the minister of armaments and munitions from 1942 on. Yet Speer was one of the very few high-ranking Nazis to declare his own guilt and shame publicly and to reveal the inner workings of the German government under Hitler in his memoirs.